General Discussion

Sometimes, if your goal is to piss off as few players as possible, there are no winning scenarios to a specific situation. Example: no resurrection policy.

Example One: No resurrections allowed, for no reason, no how. The unfortunate side of this that will cause players to complain? They die from a mistake on the part of the RPA staff, or because something screwed up in the game's code, etc. Their POV is that they've spent dozen, or hundreds of hours playing that character and building them, and all of that effort has been destroyed by something that is not their fault OOC or IC, and is the direct fault of the game or its staff.

Example Two: Resurrections are allowed, per guidelines at the discretion of the staff. This causes complaints when one player draws a parallel to another players' situation and asks the age old question, "If they got a resurrection, why didn't I?" This leaves the door more widely open to calls of favoritism, etc., be they fair or no.

Example Three: No resurrections allowed, for any reason whatso... oops, well, just this one time. This causes complaints because it will immediately appear to be favoritism to some other players, is inconsistent, and is admitting that there is a problem with the no resurrection policy.

Note ... I don't have a problem with resurrections when they are the right thing to do. My point is that, no matter what you do, some people are complain. So shouldn't the thing that you do, as a staff, be what seems right to you?

In short, and this isn't a complaint, but my proposal to take a separate complaint and make it right:

Let's do away with the no resurrection policy, and instead set guidelines for resurrections and allow some staff discretion. It was never a good policy, and it's been broken, so let's use this as a chance to make a positive change to the game. What do you say?

When the staff said no rezzes for any reason a few months ago, I was like that's gonna suck if anyone dies to a bug, but, you know, them's the breaks. I was, pretty much from day 1 of that announcement, saying that it shouldn't be no rezzes, but should instead be no rezzes unless you die to a bug or something (IE, logging out in a tavern, then logged back in in the middle of the wilderness butt naked).

However, the 'no rez at all' policy was kept, and I never had any say in the matter.

I realize that staff make mistakes-- and, indeed, if on one of the numerous occasions that the rez policy was brought up (I'll go trawling for the threads in a bit, if I care to), staff had said, "Alright, we made a mistake, we're tweaking the rez policy," and then a rez happened, that would've been cool.

Changing the policy after a rez, however, is just going to piss everyone off, and more than likely draw ire to the one guy who got a rez when everyone else was blown off.

It's a beta, so people should be encouraged to try to find bugs that are fatal by not having to waste a character doing so. Also, all RPAs might find bugs on their end that are fatal for characters, which should be resolved if possible. Those are both good things.

Circumstantial policy should be definitely be in place though, that defines when staff make those rezzes, especially now that it's been exercised like that anyway. The 'no special apps' rule at the beginning was flipped about to become special apps with approval, and it was murky, but the absolutely no-rezzes from Icarus was really, really not.

I think people would be fighting each other less if policy was adhered to across the board, whether or not that policy is well loved, though.

Songweaver wrote:Let's do away with the no resurrection policy, and instead set guidelines for resurrections and allow some staff discretion. It was never a good policy, and it's been broken, so let's use this as a chance to make a positive change to the game. What do you say?

Yes.

krelm wrote:Changing the policy after a rez, however, is just going to piss everyone off, and more than likely draw ire to the one guy who got a rez when everyone else was blown off.

I can live with it.

After all, who wants to be the guy who dies to staffside screen scroll, gets rezzed in spite of policy, sees policy changed to agree he should have been rezzed, and then gets de-rezzed?

It seems more or less unanimous that the no rez policy was not very helpful or effective, and my opinion is the same - we need to move to a conditional rez policy.

As to the matter at hand, I confess that I'm starting to grow a tiny bit skeptical of how these things work in the upstairs department, and even I (and I tend to be the last person in the game to suspect deliberate foul play) sort of want to know who the rezzed PC was, who he or she was played by, and so on.

Regardless of that encroaching cynicism, that the policy needs to be changed is absolute certainty, and that'll be a step in the right direction here.

The situations in which a character deserves a rez are generally really straight forward I think. A bug killing a character is a rez. An accident by staff intervention is a rez. Anything else even twink pk shouldn't get rezed.

Gobbo wrote:The situations in which a character deserves a rez are generally really straight forward I think. A bug killing a character is a rez. An accident by staff intervention is a rez. Anything else even twink pk shouldn't get rezed.

For the cheesebun impaired, I approve thoroughly of this man's simple but eloquent reasoning.

Surely the less time Staff play detective the more time they have to work on the game? I've said it before, this is Beta, we as a player base are not getting this. We are treating this as a final product. Let the staff build, shape and plot.

Hawkwind wrote:Surely the less time Staff play detective the more time they have to work on the game? I've said it before, this is Beta, we as a player base are not getting this. We are treating this as a final product. Let the staff build, shape and plot.

I don't think that SOI is a good example of a typical game "alpha". First off, alpha-tests are usually closed to invite only. Every player receives an instruction packet and a scorecard that helps them notice, explore and designate bugs, then report them in an effective manner. The game itself is bare-bones and often doesn't "make sense" if you attempt to dissect its plot/etc.

An "alpha-test" for an RPI is a strange concept to me. RPAs invest into one-time-only plot that will never be seen again. Players play 40+ (some far more) hours a week, developing characters and storylines that are unique to this game, this time. If this were a true alpha-test, I feel like we'd just run around breaking stuff in Laketown without any roleplay requirements or rules, reporting bugs and generally being helpful to the development of the game.

No, but we are playing and investing our time and creative energies into this. This is a full game.

It's just a young game, and I think that that's an important distinction to make. It's not unreasonable, given the time/energies folks put into the game, to expect their time and energy to be treated with the same fairness you'd expect in one year, or two years.

Hawkwind wrote:Surely the less time Staff play detective the more time they have to work on the game? I've said it before, this is Beta, we as a player base are not getting this. We are treating this as a final product. Let the staff build, shape and plot.

So then if someone dies, they're dead, no resurrections. Oh wait, if a staff member kills someone on accident and feels bad about it they can rez. Oh wait, no they can't, because the rules are 'no detective work, no rezzes'. What demands a rez is pretty straight forward. Not having a policy about it and just winging it makes people point fingers. Like me after they rezzed someone with the policy being 'no rezzes'. It can be a little worrying when my three negative experiences so far in admin stopped deaths.

Know what would fix complaints from people about this? A very simple policy. I'll write it right now.

'If you die because of a code bug or an admin makes a whoopsie and you die, you get rezzed.' Tada!

Hawkwind wrote:Surely the less time Staff play detective the more time they have to work on the game? I've said it before, this is Beta, we as a player base are not getting this. We are treating this as a final product. Let the staff build, shape and plot.

So then if someone dies, they're dead, no resurrections. Oh wait, if a staff member kills someone on accident and feels bad about it they can rez. Oh wait, no they can't, because the rules are 'no detective work, no rezzes'. What demands a rez is pretty straight forward. Not having a policy about it and just winging it makes people point fingers. Like me after they rezzed someone with the policy being 'no rezzes'. It can be a little worrying when my three negative experiences so far in admin stopped deaths.

Know what would fix complaints from people about this? A very simple policy. I'll write it right now.

'If you die because of a code bug or an admin makes a whoopsie and you die, you get rezzed.' Tada!

I've said it once, I've said it a thousand times(by now), but...

Rules and policy will always beat out over arbitrary decision-making. Even if the rule ends with(or is summed up by) Staff as "We will do what we see fit depending on circumstances," at least players know ahead of time. It's better if it's constant, though.

Hawkwind wrote:Surely the less time Staff play detective the more time they have to work on the game? I've said it before, this is Beta, we as a player base are not getting this. We are treating this as a final product. Let the staff build, shape and plot.

So then if someone dies, they're dead, no resurrections. Oh wait, if a staff member kills someone on accident and feels bad about it they can rez. Oh wait, no they can't, because the rules are 'no detective work, no rezzes'. What demands a rez is pretty straight forward. Not having a policy about it and just winging it makes people point fingers. Like me after they rezzed someone with the policy being 'no rezzes'. It can be a little worrying when my three negative experiences so far in admin stopped deaths.

Know what would fix complaints from people about this? A very simple policy. I'll write it right now.

'If you die because of a code bug or an admin makes a whoopsie and you die, you get rezzed.' Tada!

Pushing for the ban to be lifted wholesale just seems to be a bad idea for the delicate stage of the game right now. Staff stepping down and such. The less the workload and drama (and it normally is drama since most will be PK OMG REZ PLZ) the less stressed the staff have.

Hawkwind wrote: since most will be PK OMG REZ PLZ) the less stressed the staff have.

The problem with this argument is that, in both cases, the rules don't say "you can get resurrected for bad PKs." They say "no resurrections whatsover," or, as Matt's suggesting, "Resurrections for Staff mistakes/bugs."

In both cases, people can still go, "PK OMG REZ PLZ," regardless of the rules. "No resurrections at all" doesn't preclude people asking, any more than bug/mistake resurrections encourage it.

I've never had a rez policy take me more than like thirty minutes every few weeks. It's pretty obvious when the rez is caused by an admin or a code mistake (hi tehkory ). I'm of the opinion that the rez policy is best where it's on a rare, case to case basis, and there has to be clear proof that it was caused by some kind of design error. Besides, the worst thing that can happen is that a player petitions for a rez, and they're told no.

"I added an extra zero" is, if I may say so, the funniest death I've ever died to, and forever what I'm thinking of when I bring up bugs/resurrections. And that one took you all of sixty seconds, tops.